Delayed Reaction: Sherrybaby

The Pitch: Maggie Gyllenhaal doesn't get enough lead roles. If she gets one, what kind of awards buzz would that carry?

A recovering drug addict gets out of jail and tries to put her life back together so she can get her daughter back.

A knock that I get in my personal life is that I don't have a lot of empathy. I'm not sure that people use that word right a lot of the time, but I know what they mean by it. I've gotten pretty good at getting around it. I know when to stay quiet about certain topics, and I can make token gestures that show a good-faith effort. Really though, I'm pretty cold in that way. A place where it really comes out is with a movie like Sherrybaby.

Simply put, I hate this character and I don't feel bad for her. I spent the entire movie on everyone's side but hers (Well, maybe not her father's either). I get what the movie is doing. It wants to make Sherry real and flawed. She's had a fucked up life from a young age, and that often leads to her being a fucked up adult. I understand that the point of the movie is that it's showing how much shit she has to go through to be able to make even a marginal improvement.

I don't care. I found the 90 minutes with this character thoroughly unpleasant. Her big accomplishment by the end of the movie is that she didn't kidnap her daughter. Way to go! I don't find her struggle that interesting. She's a liar, she takes advantage of the kindness of others, and she takes every shortcut she can. I need a little more. I'm not going to root for a character just because she's on screen. This is a movie about all the worst parts of Sherry, and it cuts off right as we get her first nascent signs of growth.

Now, I should say that as a character piece, Maggie Gyllenhaal knocks it out of the park. This is a great performance. Gyllenhaal plays Sherry without vanity and attacks her every flaw with gusto. It's crazy to think that she didn't get an Oscar nomination for this the same year that Ryan Gosling was nominated for Half Nelson. Maybe the Academy agreed with me that this was too focused on the warts. No, you know what it was? There must've been too much vote-splitting over whether to vote for her in this or Stranger Than Fiction*.

*Please, just let me have this delusion.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Brothers Grimm

The Pitch: Terry Gilliam + Harvey Weinstein + Matt Damon & Heath Ledger. What could go wrong?

The Grimm brothers are con men, acting as supernatural exterminators until one day, they run into a job that really is supernatural.

It was worth a try.

The intellectual property "holy grail" is taking something that's public domain and turning it into a franchise. Nearly every studio has tried it and most have failed. Just think of how many Robin Hood or King Arthur movies there have been over the years. It's really hard to pull off though. That's why Disney will pay billions of dollars to buy Star Wars or Amazon will pay $100 million just for the rights to make a Lord of the Rings show. Still, all you need is one producer who thinks he or she knows better, and $80 million later, there's The Brothers Grimm.

Just about everything about this movie's development was wrong-headed. The myth of Terry Gilliam as a director precedes him. He specializes in cult hits. Monty Python and the Holy Grail made its money on video. Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and Fear in Loathing in Las Vegas all made less that $11 million. Even his hits - 12 Monkeys, The Fisher King, Time Bandits - had been modest. He's only ever had 1 top 30 movie for the year (Time Bandits, all the way back in 1981). Studios like the idea of a Terry Gilliam movie, then pull back as soon as they see what he's doing. That's exactly what happened with The Brothers Grimm. For some reason, Dimension (under Miramax, i.e. Harvey Weinstein) took this movie on as the most expensive film they'd ever made. That was a terrible idea. Harvey Weinstein was known for imposing himself on movies. In no world would two men as stubborn and demanding as Gilliam and Weinstein work well together. The movie of course kept getting delayed. Gilliam wanted a lot more money for it. Weinstein want for final cut power. It was really a whole mess.

Worst of all, because of all the delays, both The League of Extraordinary Gentleman and Van Helsing soured the "alternate takes of public domain fantasy stories" market. By the time The Brothers Grimm finally showed up, no one was interested and the narrative of its failure had already been written.

This movie is like sand through my fingers trying to remember anything about it. I even have the Wikipedia page pulled up and I'm forgetting parts of it a paragraph at a time.

Heath Ledger was my favorite actor before his death, so I'm running out of movies of his that I haven't seen. Sadly, this is a reminder that there is a reason why I haven't seen the remaining movies already. I like the idea of Ledger and Matt Damon as costars in an adventure movie. Apparently, they swapped roles after they were cast for the movie. I can't say if that was a good decision or not. What I can say is that if the actors in a movie can just switch roles, then that probably doesn't speak well about how well written the characters are. The whole point of casting is that you find the right person for a specific role, right?

The movie has some base level thrills. Gilliam brings some great visuals. Ledger and Damon have enough screen presence to make scenes work. The movie is more forgettable than bad.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Junebug

The Pitch: No, I swear; MY story of going back home is unique and special.

A Chicago art gallery owner struggles to fit in when she visits her husband's family in North Carolina.

Hollywood has a lot of unwritten rules like "never ask a producer what they actually do" or "it's fair to rate a production by the quality of its craft services". There's an important one for screenwriters that goes something like this: "All Hollywood screenwriters must have a screenplay about going back home". They don't have to sell the script or even attempt to get it made, but they all have to have one in a drawer at their desk. It's a WGA membership requirement, I believe.

The "going back home" movie is one that filmmakers love to make. Most people in Hollywood came somewhere else. A lot of people move from small towns to big cities, and when they go back home, they feel out of place. This isn't unique to filmmakers, but they're the only ones who can then make a 90 minute reflection on it. And it's the easiest exercise in writing what you know, since it basically demands conflict.

The trouble that most of these movie have is knowing how to distinguish between what's different and what's bad. If someone leaves home, presumably it's because there's something about that place they didn't like. They don't agree with the people there. There isn't enough opportunity. They don't fit in. Even if they have affection for the place, it tends to come from a place of superiority, which is perfectly natural. If you decide you don't want something, you can approximate why someone else would want that, but it never really makes sense to you. So, if you leave a place because it isn't what you want, you feel there's something wrong with the people who do want that.
 

I think Junebug's heart is in the right place. This isn't a movie about Embeth Davidtz constantly being disgusted by her husband's family. She wants to get along with them. She's desperate to find things they have in common. She asks her father-in-law about his woodworking. She's so proud when she thinks she found his missing screwdriver. She doesn't look at her energetic sister-in-law (Amy Adams) as a pest. She wants to bond with her. The problem I kept running into was that it always felt like her coming "down" to their level. Adams is always talking about how smart and sophisticated Davidtz is. The mother-in-law is concerned that Davidtz thinks she's better than them. Her brother-in-law is resentful of his brother's life. It's also not helpful that the artist Davidtz is there to visit is a complete cartoon, which reflects on the area as well. At least when movies do the lazy "People from the cities have no heart. People in small towns have no brains" dichotomy, there's a simple dividing line. But, in Junebug, Davidtz is a good person, or at least trying to be one.

Before you accuse me of reading too much into this, ask yourself one question: Is anyone in this movie other than Davidtz and her husband smart? I know they aren't educated, but are they smart? I'd say no. They are nice. The father-in-law is close, but he's really just stoic. I can't think of any point when one of the in-laws is smarter than Davidtz. A great counter-point to this is Friday Night Lights. That show is filled with characters who aren't traditionally "smart" who the show fully respects and never looks down on. It really isn't that hard. All you have to do is think about why these characters chose this life.

Sorry for the diatribe. I'm sure Junebug is suffering for the sins of past movies of its ilk. Junebug is far from the worst offender of this urban superiority complex. As I mentioned, it actually puts in an effort with its characters. The movie loves Amy Adams, and who can blame it? She's terrific and lovable. Her Oscar nomination for this makes a lot of sense. I think Benjamin McKenzie has an impossible character to play. He does get my favorite scene though. I love during the baby shower when he sees the show on about meerkats and tries to record it. It's such a sweet gesture. I spent so much of the movie wondering if he even likes his wife. That scene confirms that he just has trouble expressing his affection for her.

I like how Davidtz's husband is sidelined for most of the movie, yet he get the last line, about how much he hates it there. First of all, he doesn't really. We've seen plenty to know otherwise. It's just not somewhere he could live. Also, it's a reminder that there's a whole other movie we aren't seeing that's about him looking back on the place he grew up in and worrying about if his wife and family will get along. I think it's shitty of him for laying on the guilt trip for Davidtz not going with him to the hospital. Maybe I'm heartless, but I think it's excusable for her to miss it. There's a legit work crisis and she has only known these people for a couple days. Adams might've not even given birth by the time she got back. How was she to know there would be a miscarriage? That all bothered me. It seemed like a late course correction by the movie, trying to sell Davidtz out by painting her as the self-centered city person after spending so much of the movie avoiding that angle.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend